36 / European Background of the Ohio Mennonites and Amish

took place in the midst of a time when many Mennonites in the Palatinate and Alsace were suffering the hardships of war. Apparently the causes were deep and long-standing. The person most prominent in the controversy was a young Mennonite bishop from Alsace, Jakob Ammann. He seems to have been a zealous leader who became especially concerned about what he considered to be a lax application of the church's discipline on shunning excommunicated members. The Meidung (common German word for avoidance of expelled members) had been introduced into the Alsatian churches but not all ministers agreed on how it should be enforced. Until the time of the Amish controversy it does not seem to have been practiced in its extreme form.

Ammann's concerns for a "safe" church centered around two other issues besides the Meidung. One of these was the question as to whether a certain woman should be excommunicated because she spoke a falsehood. The other issue was whether it was correct to say that all "truehearted" persons (Anabaptist sympathizers but not members) would be saved. Ammann's chief opponent on these issues was Hans Reist. In a letter of November 22, 1693, Jakob Ammann accused Reist of forsaking. the true gospel because he differed from him on these three issues. Ammann also favored holding communion twice a year, rather than annually, and later he also introduced the ordinance of footwashing. However, these innovations were not the crucial issues in the controversy. Ammann's contentions for uniformity in dress (including style of hat, clothing for the body, shoes, and stockings) and his protest against trimming the beard and attending state churches are in the record but they too were not the major dividing factor.

Hearing reports that church discipline was lax and that some ministers believed that a moral life was all that was needed for salvation, young Jakob Ammann felt the time had come for action. Accordingly, he took Uli Ammann, Christian Blank, and Niklaus Augspurger with him on a tour of the churches in Switzerland in order to learn where the leaders of the congregations stood on the shunning or Meidung issue. During the investigation tour they also sought to find out if certain ministers believed that all truehearted people would be saved. One of the places visited was Utigen where they pressed Hans Reist for his opinion on the Meidung. His answer was, "What one eats is no sin; Christ also ate with publicans and sinners." This unsatisfactory answer was followed by another